The Net is Dead

Marco van Hylckama Vlieg on web technology, design, life and everything

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• At 06 February '06 - 12:52 Khevor wrote:

  

  I don’t consider myself a PHP developer but rather a PHP dabbler (i.e. I basically create what I need at the time). However, having said that, I’ve wanted to start working in PHP5 but unless I decide to do it all from my computer, I can’t do it. My host won’t change to PHP5 nor upgrade beyond Apache 1.3.x (Not sure what it’s sitting at atm). I think this may also be true for a lot of other people.

  
  

• At 06 February '06 - 13:49 Max Roeleveld wrote:

  

  Yes, that’s the exact problem: lots of hosters that are reluctant to upgrade to new major versions. And you can bet that on a server that’s hosting 200 domains, SOMEONE is bound to have a bad piece of code that’s going to cause “interesting” support calls, which hosters tend to dislike. =]
  
  If it ain’t broke…
  
  Of course, the “PHP Apache2 doesn’t work because of threading issues”-myth doesn’t exactly help. I’ve been using Apache 2 and PHP 4 for quite a while, never as much as a hiccup, but a lot of folks are not willing to risk downtime, which is understandable, of course.

  
  

• At 06 February '06 - 13:58 Bram wrote:

  

  Ooh, object oriented programming, I like that! I’ve done that!
  Too bad indeed that PHP keeps a bit behind on this issue…

  
  

• At 06 February '06 - 16:56 Dewey Spencer wrote:

  

  I shall consider myself lucky then.
  
  My hosting provider has recently rolled out ruby/rails, subversion, and php5. This past week I installed symfony and typo and I must admit that I am down right giddy.
  
  It’s like Christmas with all these new toys. Now I just have to find some of that fabled “spare time” stuff. ;)

  
  

• At 07 February '06 - 00:19 Marco wrote:

  

  I think a host that doesn’t (want to) support PHP5 is a shitty host. I could write a whole essay about it but it’s plain shitty. It’s easy to support both even, like Dreamhost does. Like that people who don’t want to fix their code can happily keep running PHP4 and party like it’s 2003 while the rest of us can move on.

  
  

• At 07 February '06 - 05:18 Simon wrote:

  

  Actually my host supports PHP5 and is running on Apache 2.0.53… But nevertheless it’s a shitty one…

  
  

• At 07 February '06 - 08:11 Cal Evans wrote:

  

  Speaking as a host and a programmer, moving to PHP5 in a multi-domain environment is tricky. It took me a weekend to go from 4.x to 5.0. I’ve been lazy about the move to 5.1, I know it will be easier.
  
  The move itself wasn’t difficult but I had to then visit phpBB and other assorted programs, upgrade where necessary to get everything back working. The worst weren’t packages but custom written software. (ok, so a lot of it was mine personally!)
  
  The pain of upgrading and the lack of incentive is probably what is keeping a lot of hosts from taking the 5.x plunge.
  
  IMHO, etc.
  
  =C=

  
  

• At 07 February '06 - 09:11 Somekool wrote:

  wait, Rails never pretend to have invented the MVC model. They just brought it very nicely to the user. We all know this model is years old. unfortunately tons of PHP project try unsuccessfully to implement it.
  
  you must also not forget that Ruby is a mature programmation language (as old as java and python) and made by people with the goal of creating the best language ever.

  
  

• At 07 February '06 - 10:11 Marco wrote:

  

  @Somekool I didn’t mean to say Rails / Ruby invented MVC. What I really mean is the fact that many developers recently ‘discovered MVC’ through RoR which is why they started liking RoR so much. But in reality it was really MVC design they started liking so much. See what I mean?

  
  

• At 08 February '06 - 07:50 Pieter wrote:

  

  Cool.

  
  

• At 08 February '06 - 07:56 Max Roeleveld wrote:

  

  I didn’t notice it before, but:
  
  

  
  I placed this entry under ‘programming’ but it might as well have been placed under ‘rants’ really.
  

  
  
  Dude! You need to, like, switch to WordPress. It won’t make a difference about the PHP5 support out there, but at least you can put the post under both programming and rants. =]

  
  

• At 08 February '06 - 07:59 Marco wrote:

  

  Well check out what just happened to this post …
  
  And now…. ‘In je mand!’

  
  

• At 08 February '06 - 23:17 Kyle wrote:

  

  I’ve been cruzing with PHP5 on my production apps for little over a year now, I don’t get why no one likes it. Though, while OOP is improved — it’s kind of like a Horse that only has a couple of broken legs instead of a shot to the heart. Personally, I like PHP5 more for the littler things, like SimpleXML (which is highly underrated) and solid DOM support.
  
  Though as for porting PHP4 apps, the problem inlies with the language upgrade itself. It’s not that it’s hard (there are very few changes that need to be done), but rather that people prefer not to maintain their apps at all. Sysadmins that switch to PHP5 would look like morons.
  
  Here, is where I think it turns interesting: you’ve outlined one of the largest benefits of Rails. When Ruby changes, Rails can account for it (because Ruby is a dynamic language) and the end user feels nothing (A great example of this was the recent change to Logger). Try that on for size. ;)

  
  

• At 09 February '06 - 01:11 Marco wrote:

  

  @Kyle that’s true but wouldn’t that be the same thing for any framework? Again we can’t really compare the framework Rails to the language PHP5. If we want to make such a comparison we should compare Rails to WASP or Symfony really. PHP5 may only be compared to Ruby, not Rails.
  
  If only I had the time I’d check out RoR more but I’m afraid it’s not going to be possible any time soon…

  
  

• At 09 February '06 - 13:45 Kyle wrote:

  

  Nope, not at all. Let’s say PHP changed how the function preg_replace_callback() works (oh wait… they did, and broke every install of Markdown with the latest 5.0 upgrade). With PHP there’s nothing you can do about it. That’s the end of that, change your code.
  
  With Ruby, it’s a dynamic language, and you could potentially rewrite the function from the ground up. This allows a framework to not only control the framework, but the language itself. PHP will never be able to do this.

  
  

• At 10 February '06 - 08:43 Gijs wrote:

  

  I am a production manager at an IT company, I’ve just made the decision to start a new project for a large website in PHP5, probably using Symphony.
  
  We’ve looked at Ruby but I find it too tricky to invest in a new language while I’m confident about LAMP and I can easily find more developers to work with PHP.
  
  We do work on dedicated servers for all projects so we could choose any platform or framework, but i think PHP5 is the best option now for fast, high traffic consumer websites. We use a lot of XML to store and retrieve data, so i’m quite happy about its new features and performance.

  
  

• At 10 February '06 - 09:14 Pete D wrote:

  

  I’m just loving Rails at the minute, you’re right its not the first language or framework to use the MVC pattern however its the firstone I know of which does it for the web and does it out of the box. I’ve tried many times to create something similar in ASP with JScript (sorry PHP programmers) and .net but its never seemed right, easy or clean. Rails rocks though and has show me “how” to implement MVC in a web environment which is where I always struggled.
  
  Pete

  
  

• At 11 February '06 - 02:55 Dominique PERETTI wrote:

  

  While it’s true that Ruby is superior to PHP in terms of design of the language, while it’s true that RoR is probably superior to any counterpart in PHP, it’s good to hear someone acknowledging that PHP5 is not that far behind.
  PHP5 syntax is quite ugly compared to ruby but it’s fast, rock-solid, and easy to deploy.
  And one can write clean code with PHP5.
  I’ve developed my own lightweight framework that somewhat mimics rails from the controller/view standpoint.
  It uses Smarty for the views.
  It is currently integrated into alahup! to let developers create modules but it will be released as a stand-alone package in a near future.
  Read this to get an idea :
  http://www.alahup.net/documentation/dev/..

  
  

• At 13 February '06 - 14:48 Mike Papageorge wrote:

  

  Yet PHP seems to be unable to escape from the script hacking phase in many cases.
  
  Hmm.. Just like poor html, seems that as long as it works, people will be getting into PHP at the script hacking level, no doubt.
  
  I think the problem here lies in the fact that much of the PHP population is script hackers and dabblers. They aren’t going to push for PHP5, and the ones that do want the OOP glory, and need it and can use it etc, will be working in environments where they can employ it. Like my laptop

  
  

• At 14 February '06 - 05:48 Tom wrote:

  

  I’ve recently switched to ruby on rails from php and damn I like it. In fact I just started a blog about it. I can tell I did like the MVC patterns which are applied in it but the main reasons were probably the simplicity of the syntax and the intergration with script.aculo.us and prototype.js. There is a php alternative, cakephp, which I tried after trying rails since I could already code php. But it seemed this framework didn’t have the magic ruby on rails had. Hopefully in future versions they can try to convince me as the php community support is so much better than ruby support.

  
  

• At 14 February '06 - 22:24 quocbao wrote:

  

  I tried PHP 5 just after it realesed . And it’s cool .
  
  But i still write my app in PHP 4 , because few web servers support PHP 5.
  
  i think , if you want people using PHP 5, webmaster must upgrade his PHP version first :)

  
  

• At 16 February '06 - 03:30 Veracon wrote:

  

  I totally agree. If people are going to wait a few years after a technology is released before using it, what the fu_ck is the point of making new releases? Honestly, to me too, any host that doesn’t in any way offer PHP 5 is a shitty host. Mine only installed it by default like a month ago, but until then they didn’t have a problem with me installing it myself. I got shell access, got unjailed and got GCC access, and soon I was up and running with PHP 5 (as a CGI application, but it’s better than nothing, yeah?).

  
  

• At 20 February '06 - 02:47 Wim wrote:

  

  I have been playing around with PHP5 since end 2004 and never wanted to go back to php4 again. I have it on my server as standard (currently version 5.0.5 combined with Apache 2.0.50) .
  Another provider where I have an account does not want to migrate to PHP5 , because of compatibility issues for his existing customer base.
  I have PHP5.1.2 in my development environment but the transition was at first a pain in the neck because of the alterations made for e.g. the PDO extension and support for SQLite 2.8 databases (has be compiled in separately).
  The language of choice for serious hackers back at the end of the 20th century was Perl. No buzz around this language anymore and they remain stalled at 5.8… Given the current development in PHP and the adaptation of newly released functionality , makes me think that the appeal of PHP will gradually fade away in favour of RoR, AJAX an the like.
  In addition, when looking at the roadmap for future PHP releases, there is nothing overly exciting is in it for me.
  
  What continues to surprise me in this whole discussion is the lacklazard way at which people implement security updates for both Apache and PHP. All incremental updates contain bug resolutions you actually need to have.

  
  

• At 21 February '06 - 07:22 Nate K wrote:

  

  I have been using PHP5 for a little over a year now and I love it. I must say, at one point I was more of the ‘hacker’ with my PHP4 scripts. I look at these as my ‘learning years :)’.
  
  I took the initiative to get serious with it and have developed the majority of my apps with OO PHP, even small frameworks for small sites. I have played with CAKEPHP and it was nice – just not exactly what I needed.
  
  I have yet to dive into RoR, but am excited to check it out. I have only seen some videos of the backend, and played with the frontend of several apps. Will it replace PHP (as compared to PHP replacing Perl)...im not sure. I still think PHP has a good hold on many websites out there (as sad and hacked as some may be).
  
  The MVC approach is what I use with my PHP code and it works great! It allows me to fix update things, without getting in the designers and marketers way.
  
  So – in response to the actual article – I think it is the PROGRAMMERS who need to step it up a notch. I know not all have the availability of PHP5 – but seriously, it blows PHP4 out of the water. I would press to get it on your hosting account. (I am one of the lucky ones who administrates the webserver and can control the security).
  
  Good article!

  
  

• At 21 February '06 - 15:56 Jero wrote:

  

  I agree with you here, but I think the popularity of PHP is what’s making it almost impossible for web hosting companies to switch. Because of this popularity more and more idiots started using it which resulted in badly coded applications. If web hosting companies would switch from PHP 4 to 5, those scripts wouldn’t survive the upgrade. Of course, supporting both 4 and 5 is a solution, but I guess most web hosts don’t really like this solution because the demand for PHP 5 does not always outweigh higher server load.

  
  

• At 26 February '06 - 18:21 Jason Brown wrote:

  

  As a self taught php programmer, I guess I fall under a script ‘hacker’, making simple linear scripts as I need them and modifing pre-written scripts like wordpress when needed. Not worried about code reuse or scaleabilty in my scripts.
  
  I do however want to learn about advanced programming in php. Right now I am on php4 and would like to move to php5 and learn OOP and MVC styles.
  
  Where on the net can I find a good place to learn this easily?
  
  Pretty much my learning has been limited to reading a few ‘newbie’ php books and online at places like sitepoint.com. However these books and sites hardly help someone like me move to more advanced techniques like OOP, classes, MVC and other styles. If they do discuss advanced techniques, then it is geared to those already fimiliar with those advanced styles.
  
  SO where is the middle ground? Most sites and booked are geared to newbies or very advanced techniques that require you to know about the subject already.
  
  I have found it hard to find a good resource that walks into the middle ground area to teach someone the models and techniques past a beginners phase.
  
  Any suggestions?

  
  

• At 27 February '06 - 04:41 Marco wrote:

  

  @Jason I agree with you that it’s hard to find ‘middle ground’ educational material. If you don’t know any OO concepts yet you might want to read a book on UML like this one
  
  It will teach you how to ‘think object oriented’ and how the design process works. When teaching PHP I’ve found that people really need a conceptual basis before they can actually design any OO applications themselves. It’s easy to look at PHP examples that are object oriented but it’s very hard to create it yourself if you’ve never done that before. This is why I can highly recommend accquiring some basic UML knowledge beforehand.
  
  After that you’ll probably be able to much better understand the OO tutorials you’ll find at (for example) zend.com and other places on the web.

  
  

• At 28 February '06 - 06:33 Test wrote:

  

  hi sorry this is just a test…

  
  

• At 28 February '06 - 06:37 Marco wrote:

  

  Care to elaborate on what the hell one should ‘test’ on someone else his website?

  
  

• At 15 March '06 - 12:23 Rich wrote:

  

  I’m for everything that makes life and work easier and not so routine.

  
  

• At 26 April '06 - 08:48 Nick wrote:

  

  PHP developers looking for a light, powerful and fast MVC style framework should check out CodeIgniter, which is brought to us by the smart folks who develop Expression Engine.
  
  As a PHP-first developer who’s also used RoR to develop commercial apps, and dabbled with Symfony and Cake, I fell in love with the simplicity, flexibility, speed, ease of deployment and relatively ego-free world of CodeIgniter.
  
  For those who are stuck with PHP4 but want to dabble with PHP5, Mediatemple have just announced that their new shared server package will allow you to specify which version your account runs, and it doesn’t need to be safe-moded. Worth a look…

  
  

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